Yeah this. Python was already popular with the early adopters, and it’s a fairly easy language to learn and use. After that it became a network effect thing: all the best tools were already written in Python so people continued to do so.
Also a lot of data scientists aren’t really programmers. They just learned Python to do data science. Learning a new language for this purpose would be both very difficult and, in their eyes, often unnecessary.
I once had dinner with a Stanford professor, years back, who was talking about the fact that he liked teaching in Python because he spent way less time teaching the language and more the higher level stuff that he was actually trying to get across than when he was using C++. Lower barrier to entry for new users. I’d guess that probably in the intervening years, a lot of classes have decided to use it for similar reasons. If you want to teach, I dunno, signal processing and your students maybe don’t have a great handle on the language yet, you want to be spending time on the signal processing stuff, not on language concepts.
Overspark@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Yeah this. Python was already popular with the early adopters, and it’s a fairly easy language to learn and use. After that it became a network effect thing: all the best tools were already written in Python so people continued to do so.
TehPers@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Also a lot of data scientists aren’t really programmers. They just learned Python to do data science. Learning a new language for this purpose would be both very difficult and, in their eyes, often unnecessary.
tal@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I once had dinner with a Stanford professor, years back, who was talking about the fact that he liked teaching in Python because he spent way less time teaching the language and more the higher level stuff that he was actually trying to get across than when he was using C++. Lower barrier to entry for new users. I’d guess that probably in the intervening years, a lot of classes have decided to use it for similar reasons. If you want to teach, I dunno, signal processing and your students maybe don’t have a great handle on the language yet, you want to be spending time on the signal processing stuff, not on language concepts.
Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
This was infuriating to me when I started college as a CS major. I dropped out after Intro because they weren’t giving us anything worth remembering.